wtm@neoucom.UUCP (Bill Mayhew) (01/11/87)
Hi John & net, I tried to get hold of John directly, but our mailer is having trouble finding its way past one of the systems between us. A few weeks ago, I posted a code fragment that had orgininally appeared in mod.computers.ibm-pc earlier this summer. It was to be used with msdos debug to enable Wordstar version 3.3 to display 43 lines on an EGA monitor. This is accomplished by patching in a few calls to the BIOS to set the EGA card for 43 line mode. Also, a couple of constants were changed to allow WS to access all 43 lines on the terminal. John couldn't get the patch to work. The symptom was that Wordstar acted like it was running on a 43 line terminal, but the display did not switch. To answer a question for John. The exact version that I fixed was indeed version 3.3p; the same as yours. The equipment that I was running on was: Epson 8MHz, AT clone, AST 3G video board, NEC Multisync, and 640K main memory. If anybody else tried the patch, but couldn't get it to work, please email me, as it might have gotten damaged in transit on the net. I tried the version I posted again on my WS just to be sure, and it worked. One thing that comes to mind is that if you are running on an IBM brand XT made before October 27, 1982,* the ROM BIOS on the motherboard does not have the necessary hooks to be able to chain-in the BIOS extensions that are carried on the EGA card. I think that calls to the EGA BIOS would likely be ignored, or else result in unpredictable behavior of the program. This sort of sounds like what is happening to me, as the patch changed the screen size constants, but isn't altering the hardware state. Any gurus care to comment? *"EGA Times 12", Byte, Jan '87, vol 12, issue 1, p.316 --Bill Bill Mayhew Division of Basic Medical Sciences Notheastern Ohio Universities' College of Medicine Rootstown, OH 44272 USA phone: 216-325-2511 (wtm@neoucom.UUCP ...!cbatt!neoucom!wtm)